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Colour Wheel: The Most Disastrous Assignment To Date

We were given an assignment to take photos of the 12 colours on the colour wheel and then use our creativity to arrange the photos to form a colour wheel.

I’m going to be honest, this assignment did not go as planned at all… For various reasons:

1) Due to lengthy class times, by the time I finished with my last class of the day, the sun has already set and the lighting made it very difficult to take photos.

2) Due to other difficulties, I had to change my shooting location from Cape Town, to my local town of Paarl. Paarl can’t be compared to a city such as Cape Town, because it’s a small town situated in the wine lands and doesn’t offer as much excitement as the Mother City.

3) My original idea for this assignment was to take the 12 pictures, use “colour isolation” to highlight the colour that I wanted to display, then put all of these colours inside a template, so that it looks like a traditional colour wheel. I was hoping to take the easy way out and just purchase a colour isolation app on the App Store, but I was 30 US cents short of making the cheapest purchase. Then, I tried following colour isolation tutorials that can be done on GIMP (very similar to Photoshop), but none of them had the outcome that I was hoping for. The template tutorials also didn’t seem to work.

4) I guess I didn’t use my time wisely enough…

Here’s an example of colour isolation:

And the colour wheel template I was hoping to use…

Nevertheless, here are the photos that I took of the 12 colours that I could find in my local town…

RED

RED ORANGE

ORANGE

YELLOW ORANGE

YELLOW

YELLOW GREEN

This was honestly the best I could find for yellow green. Yellow green is basically a neon green and that colour was very difficult to find in my town…

GREEN

BLUE GREEN

BLUE

BLUE VIOLET

VIOLET

RED VIOLET

I believe that nature and organic life produces the most diverse range of colours, so I decided to make this assignment a little bit more challenging and interesting. I wanted to take photos of materialistic and man-made objects only. Finding purple and lime green was such a mission!

The yearly interschools between Paarl Boys’ High and Paarl Gimnasium is taking place this weekend and every year they “decorate” the town with banners representing their school’s colours. Needless to say, there was definitely not a shortage of these specific colours!

The two colours that I came across the most, were red and green. This is because of all the road signs and green dustbins that are situated around the town.

By taking all of these photos and information into account, I truly hope that you can visualize what I had in mind… I think the final product would’ve looked very good and original!

Lastly, I can’t stress enough how important and vital it is to learn to use your camera in Manual mode. It just amazed me again how inaccurate the colour can come out on your photo if you use Auto mode. The only reason why I was using Auto mode/”The Green Square Of Death”, is because I was in a hurry to get my photos taken.